Former head of the Serbian State Security Service Jovica Stanisic and his colleague, former commander of the Special Operations Unit Franko Simatovic return to the Tribunal’s Detention Unit. The pretrial conference is scheduled for 27 February 2007, and the trial is expected to start ‘soon after it’


Following the order issued by the Trial Chamber last week to suspend the provisional release of the accused, Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic returned to the UN Detention Unit in Scheveningen. This was confirmed today by the Tribunal.

Stanisic and Simatovic were in detention from their transfer to The Hague in late May 2003 to December 2004, when the Appeals Chamber dismissed the prosecution appeal and confirmed the decision of the Trial Chamber granting provisional release to the former Serbian security service chiefs pending trial. The pre-trial conference is scheduled for Wednesday, 27 February 2008 and the trial is expected to start ‘soon after that’.

Jovica Stanisic and Frenki Simatovic are charged with crimes committed by the so-called ‘special units of Serbian State Security Service’ between the summer of 1991 and late 1995 in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. According to the prosecution, those units covered all the secret units and paramilitary formations created ‘by or with the assistance of the Serbian State Security Service for special military operations in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina’. They are the ‘Red Berets’, the Special Operations Units (JSO) and Special Antiterrorist Units (SAJ) together with Arkan’s ‘Tigers’, ‘Martic’s police’ and the police of the Serbian autonomous district Slavonia, Baranja and Western Srijem. In early 2006, the indictment was extended to include crimes committed by the Scorpions in the Srebrenica area in July 1995.

The indictment alleges that Stanisic and Simatovic ‘directed, organized, equipped, trained, armed and in part funded’ all these units. Together with the former JNA, the Serbian Army of Krajina, the VRS and the paramilitary formations in Serbia, Krajina and Republika Srpska, these units launched attacks on cities and villages in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina perpetrating many crimes. The five counts of the indictment qualify these acts as crimes against humanity and violations of laws and customs of war.

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